Greet the Stranger

The cottage has burned and a child is dead, and Charlotte Gordon reads the wreckage as autobiography: the creature's rage at an unfeeling creator is Mary Shelley's rage at a father who cast her out, and Victor is the dark side of Romanticism itself, a movement whose free love was glorious for the men and lethal for the women. Then the creature makes his one request, a companion as deformed as himself, and Gordon hears a son who has out-matured his father. Her verdict reaches past the novel, to strangers, borders, and us.